Resumen
Despite remarkable progress in treating early-stage gastric cancer (GC), the clinical outcomes for patients with advanced disease remain very poor. Tissue invasion and metastasis constitute the major causes of cancer-related deaths, including GC. This highlights the urgent need to develop animal models that can recapitulate these processes to develop novel therapeutic strategies. We developed a highly reproducible and cost-effective procedure to establish orthotopic GC xenografts showing high engraftment and metastatic rates via the direct implantation of tumor cell suspensions. Compared with the routine method to establish orthotopic xenograft models by engrafting intact tumor fragments, our approach significantly shortens the experimental timeline and allows for the flexible adjustment of the number of tumor cells implanted to control the rate of tumor progression. Both dose- and time-dependent progressions of tumor invasion and metastasis were nicely recapitulated in our model. Our work provides valuable tools for studying GC progression and metastasis and developing effective therapies.